


Inches

by writerblocked



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-20
Updated: 2012-09-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 16:03:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerblocked/pseuds/writerblocked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s cleaning stripper glitter out of her hair one night when she realizes, quite suddenly, that she’s in love with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jdphoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, JD! Please, enjoy this gift from me to you.

The first time she walks into Tony Stark’s lab, she’s been his assistant for all of thirteen hours and she really needs to get some papers signed in order for some department to continue with some project that honestly neither of them could really care less about. JARVIS—a surprise and a half upon walking into his house in Malibu—leads her there and lets her in when she explains her reasons for coming. She wonders with the utmost sincerity if it’s safe to go inside.

His head is stuck under a half-constructed car when she arrives and his feet are twitching in time to the brain-meltingly loud music. At first she doesn’t even recognize him, thinks that he’s a mechanic hired to come in; the AC/DC t-shirt and dark wash jeans are a far cry from his neatly tailored clothes at the office. But when she hesitantly shouts to JARVIS to turn down the noise so she can hear herself think, out pops the head of her boss.

“Don’t turn down my music,” he says petulantly. She blinks at him, still taking in that this _is_ in fact Tony Stark sitting in front of her, face smeared with grease and eyes shining despite the whine in his tone. He bounces up from his position on the floor and navigates the cluttered space in order to stand in front of her, hands in pockets. He waits for another ten seconds for her to say something in response and finally smirks in a way that brings her back to her senses.

“Right,” she says, for no reason at all. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like that she feels flustered already. Her spine straightens itself out automatically and she turns the file she’s been carrying to face him, holding it out expectantly. “Research needs you to sign off on some funding for their new project. Looks like some kind of jet propelled mechanism for missiles, not that I’d…” She trails off when she notices that he is staring at the file. “Is there a problem?”

He looks back up at her, and then down at the file again. He sniffs and walks past her to a worktable piled high with bits of scrap. He picks up a bit of wire and chews on the end for a moment before spitting it out in distaste. When he realizes that she’s still waiting for an answer, he glances back for a moment and says, “I don’t like being handed things.”

She stares. She really can’t help it, or so she tells herself at the time. She’s had a long day. It’s six o clock in the evening and she had no idea where her boss had gone off to until his secretary kindly told her that she should try checking his home. She’d gotten lost once—nearly twice—on the winding road to his cliff side ego trip, and now he’s ignoring her and this _very important file that she had to come to his house to get him to sign_ because she had tried handing it to him.

She picks her way carefully across the lab, wary of bits of machinery that litter the floor. She almost shrieks when one of those bits of machinery actually turns out to be a self-automated robot of some sort, consisting of one prehensile arm and a three-pronged claw, which turns toward her and clicks inquisitively as she passes. Upon reaching the worktable, she sets down the file within his sight and takes a step back.

“Mr. Stark,” she says. She can see his hand twitch a little and wonders if it’s the resignation in her voice or the use of his last name. “Please, just sign the papers.”

With that she walks out of the lab, out of his house, and out of the last chance she has at retaining her sanity. Even years later, she will look at that moment as the moment she had the opportunity to quit before she got in too deep.

The papers are on her desk the next morning, signed and initialed and stamped within an inch of their lives.

\--

Time passes without giving her any notice. She would be a little unnerved by how quickly her job takes over her life, but she’s too busy to really think about that sort of thing now and she’s not sure it would matter anyway, even if she was.

She walks into the office one morning and finds a frankly enormous vase of flowers dominating her desk. She’s sure that no matter where she places it, she won’t be able to see anyone coming or going until they are right upon her. It’s very pretty, one of the most beautiful arrangements she’s ever seen, but she’s extremely confused as to its presence on her desk. She walks around it in a full circuit and finally finds a card hidden underneath a very large lily.

_Thanks for sticking with me for a year, Pep! – T._

A snort forces its way out of her nose and she moves the flowers to the far side of her desk so she can at least watch the door to her boss’s office.

It doesn’t stop him from sneaking up on her later in the day.

\--

She’s cleaning stripper glitter out of her hair one night when she realizes, quite suddenly, that she’s in love with him.

Normally such a thought wouldn’t even cause her pause. Just another errant little syntax error, something to be squashed and forgotten over the course of her busy, busy day. But the fact is that it doesn’t come to her in the middle of a busy day, rather at the end when she should really be thinking about how much she despises him because now she doesn’t have time to go over the itinerary for tomorrow with a fine-tooth comb because she’s running the fine-tooth comb through her godforsaken _hair_ for the _godforsaken stripper glitter of all things_ —

She looks at herself in the mirror, takes stock of what she sees. Pale skin, paler now as the color drains from her face. Red hair, damp from the wet comb and wet fingers and still glittering slightly in the fluorescent lights. Blue eyes, bloodshot from weariness and watery for some inexplicable reason. Mouth, trembling slightly. Nostrils, flared.

“You are Pepp—you are Virginia Potts,” she tells herself. She resists the urge to bite her lip and force it to cease its quiver. “And there is no way in hell that you’re in love with Tony Stark.”

It’s not the first time she’s lied to herself, but it feels an awful lot like it.

\--

Life gets increasingly difficult from there on out. It’s as though her acknowledgement of that stupid little thought has brought her to the universe’s attention. All of a sudden every single thing she does feels like it’s under scrutiny—especially by him. If she’s a microsecond later than usual because she had to pause and collect herself, if she’s just slightly off-beat as she sets down his coffee and his schedule, if she accidentally holds something out to him instead of setting it down near him because _god forbid_ he be handed something—well. She knows now how it feels to be the amoeba under the glass.

He narrows his eyes at her and purses his mouth—really, a very attractive mouth, she thinks, she doesn’t know why it took her three years to really look at it—and says, “Potts.”

“Yes, Mr. Stark?” she says on autopilot. She’s busy straightening things on his desk, because Tony Stark is the worst kind of slob and Pepper Potts is the worst kind of neat freak and there are two reasons already why she can’t possibly be in love with him.

“Something’s bothering you.” It’s not a question. Tony rarely asks actual questions. It’s quite annoying, actually, so that can be another reason to add to her list. “I want to know what it is.”

She smiles at him and if it comes off looking a little cracked, well that’s entirely his own fault. He doesn’t take a personal interest in his employees. (Except when it’s Happy’s nephew’s birthday and he flies the two of them out to Colorado to climb rocks or when it’s the wedding anniversary of the head of marketing and he gets the entire week off to spend time in Munich renewing his vows or when it’s Pepper’s first, second, and third year anniversaries of being his personal assistant without quitting or turning to drugs and alcohol to get herself through the day.)

“I’m fine,” she says. And it’s the truth because she is. “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

He stares at her for another long moment, eyes still narrowed and lips still pursed in an almost comical expression. Finally, he nods his head and says, “That will be all, Ms. Potts,” and she is free to go.

\--

Sometimes Tony disappears.

It isn’t often or even for long, but there are times when even his superhuman personal assistant cannot locate him—and it’s at those times when the rest of the world is panicked. Where is the boy billionaire, they ask, even though he’s hardly a boy anymore. What’s happened? Is he dead, injured, gone on a mission to find himself? Ninety-six percent of the time it’s none of the above.

Ninety-six percent of the time, Pepper gets a text on the third day after he’s disappeared. He’s in Atlanta, he says, and he wants to marry this woman he met. He went to Vegas and the pit boss won’t let him collect his winnings. He thinks he might be able to hook up a real-life Ocean’s Eleven situation, is she willing to dress up in something slinky to help him out? The words blur together for her, meaningless aside from the fact that they are from Tony. _He’s safe_ , she thinks. _He’s safe_.

She doesn’t like to think about the four percent of the time when it takes Rhodey and Happy five days to find him passed out in a hotel room in Chicago, or slumped over a bar in New York. She doesn’t like to think about the gnawing worry that cramps her stomach, the mechanical way she goes about her days while she waits for her phone to light up with news.

When he comes back he pretends like he never left, which is fine with her, because she’d rather pretend like it never happened too. The exhaustion fades as they step back into their places and the circles under her eyes grow lighter with time. This is one of the few things she likes about working for Tony Stark—he doesn’t need or want to bother himself with your problems. (Unless, of course, he does.) He never asks her why she looks as if she spent the lost time with him, and she never volunteers the information.

She’s perfectly fine with it, really. The person she becomes at those times is not someone she’s particularly proud of.

\--

When she first hears the news, she thinks that Rhodey’s overreacting. After all, it’s just like Tony to pull a disappearing act while he’s abroad to avoid some meeting or function back in the States. It doesn’t matter how many times she’s simply rescheduled or made it clear that he’s not going to get out of it—he still hides under the covers like a child dreading a test. She smiles in a brittle sort of way as she remembers the day she actually found him curled up under the covers, catlike and contrary, and had to coerce him out with—

Rhodey repeats himself. “Pepper,” he says, and his voice cracks like he’s holding back tears. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard Rhodey so close to crying. “We can’t find him. His humvee got creamed and we can’t find him.”

She hears him. It’s not like she doesn’t hear him, because she does. But for some reason the image of Tony in his bed won’t leave her mind—she can see him, legs tucked up to his stomach and hands clutching the sheet to his chest even as she tries to tug it away. She can hear his voice, grunting in frustration and whining when she manages to wrest the covers from his grip. She can remember how hard it had been to stay angry with him as he nuzzled his head back into his pillow and stoutly ignored all of her threats. She can almost—almost—

“It’s going to be okay,” she hears herself saying. She doesn’t remember giving her mouth the command to move, but it’s going as if she did. “We’re going to find him. _You’re_ going to find him. It’s Tony, Rhodey. He’s going to be okay.”

He hangs up shortly after to start organizing more search parties. She walks calmly into the bathroom and vomits until her throat is raw.

\--

Life in between losing him and finding him is uneventful. She eats, she sleeps, she works. It’s as though someone has put her on autopilot. Obadiah is a comfort, but he’s hardly a replacement. Rhodey calls in with regular updates, but they’re always the same. Words run together into a meaningless stream, all adding up to the same thing. _Not found. Not here. Not safe._

Of all the people who could hope to understand her, Happy and JARVIS are the only ones she really talks to. Obie _understands_ , sure, but _understanding_ doesn’t mean _listening_. Happy and JARVIS know the value of listening, know that sometimes silence is more comforting than empty words. She stops feeling nervous walking around his empty house and just starts feeling lonely. She stops wearing her heels when the echo begins to spook her.

It’s a weary afternoon on the ninety-seventh day after that first phone call that finds her staring into the darkened lab, remembering the last conversation she had face-to-face with her boss. The panel that JARVIS usually speaks out of is lit with a soft blue light, but he is silent. She thinks that they’re both thinking along the same lines, if not the same memories. The world is quiet just for them for a few precious moments. Then her phone rings, another update from Rhodey, and she answers.

“Pepper,” says a voice on the other end. For a moment she can’t place it, thinks that Rhodey’s voice sounds awfully strange. “Pepper, you there?”

That’s when she starts crying.

\--

Three months is a long time to live without a person, Pepper reasons. It’s a long time to think, and a long time to hurt. It’s a long time to wonder if you are going to live to see the next day. She’s sure that Tony doesn’t think she understands this. She’s also sure that he’s wrong.


End file.
